Miscellaneous

A bibliography check routine

(For those who doesn't use reference management software)

If you're not using reference management software (e.g., EndNote, Mendeley, BibTex) to generate bibliography, from time to time you'll find yourself in a difficult situation: You've cited dozens of papers in your main text, but you can't remember whether you've included them into the bibliography or not. Checking them one by one with the bibliography is time-consuming (take hours or days depending on how long the bib is.). And often times you have no idea whether you've exhausted the list. 

(That's why one should always use EndNote, or if you're a LaTex person, JabRef is a good one.)

Here's a little script I wrote in R to extract all in-line citations from a given txt file. It's pretty rough at this time, may give errors if it does not like what it digests (e.g., use comma as to semicolon when separating different papers, or other typos you make in citation formats.) But it will eventually work if you're willing to spend 15 minutes to debug it. 

Anyway, here's the link to the code. Good luck.